"Don't hesitate to lift a heavy weight; once you make up your
mind you will certainly lift it up. There are no impassable
mountains and rivers; all depends on your determination. One
should never overlook trifling matters. Whether one is respected
or despised depends on one's own behavior."--Genghis Khan as translated by Mongolia expert and Hopkins
lecturer Owen Lattimore, November 1948

It was a day when newspaper headlines "made" the news, and a
bullying senator from Wisconsin knew how to grab them. On Monday,
March 13, 1950, an inch-high banner headline screamed across the
front page of the Baltimore Evening Sun: "M'CARTHY CITES
LATTIMORE, THREE OTHERS AS 'PRO-RED.'"

Owen Lattimore, then director of Hopkins's Walter Hines Page
School of International Relations, was in Afghanistan on a
special United Nations mission to offer technical and economic
aid to that country. Flying first to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then
motoring to Kabul, he had been out of touch for weeks. On March
24, an Afghan messenger stepped out of the cold into a crowded,
smoky room. He carried a telegram from the Associated Press.

By that time, Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had escalated
his charge: In a leak to the press, McCarthy named Lattimore the
Soviet Union's top espionage agent in the United States, staking
his whole anti-communist crusade on Lattimore's guilt.

Lattimore's blunt response to the senator's charges:
"moonshine."

"McCarthy's off record ranting pure moonshine-stop," Lattimore
wrote in a cable to the AP. "Delighted his whole case rests on me
as this means he will fall flat on face-stop-exactly what he has
said on record unknown here so cannot reply in detail but will be
home in few days and will contact you then-stop."then-stop."

In 1950, McCarthy was spearheading the inquisition that would
bear his name. From the Senate floor's cradle of immunity, the
Red-hunting politician had been casting a web of spurious charges
and nebulous accusations. In a clenched fist, he waved papers he
claimed listed the names of more than 200 Communist Party members
working in U.S. government, many in the State Department. Pressed
for specifics, he fingered China expert Lattimore and three
others, including a former U.S. Navy commander and his wife.

Back in Baltimore, Lattimore's wife and fellow East Asia expert
Eleanor Holgate Lattimore learned of the charges from a reporter
after she answered the phone in their Ruxton home. She quickly
fired off a double-barreled denial: "First of all," Eleanor
Lattimore told Evening Sun reporters, "my husband has never been
a State Department consultant or official of any sort. Second, he
has never been a communist or a pro-communist. He is
anti-communist."

"These charges are so ridiculous," she later added, "yet at the
same time so serious."

McCarthyism--a term Owen Lattimore is credited with coining--
would trail the sinologist for more than five years: He was the
target of Senate "loyalty" hearings, and a grand jury indictment
on perjury charges that were finally dropped in 1955. What
happened to the Hopkins scholar along the way tested the limits
of academic freedom, the mettle of a nationally recognized
university, the ethics of senators, and the patience of a man.
All suffered.

A half-century later, popular culture seems to include little of
Lattimore's story, though other well-known targets of McCarthy,
including U.S. diplomat Alger Hiss '26, remain in the public eye
as family and fans fight to clear reputations. Many of those who
do remember the Lattimore affair remain unclear on the details.
Did Lattimore hold tenure at Hopkins, even though he held no
higher degree? Did he lie to the U.S. Senate? Was he, after all,
a communist?

Despite the dropping of all charges against Lattimore, the taint
of McCarthy's accusations would follow the scholar to his death
in 1989--nearly 40 years later.

His story, much of it documented in Hopkins's Ferdinand Hamburger
Jr. Archives, shows what can befall a sometimes cantankerous man
defending his honor in a repressive era. And the retelling of his
tale is sure to invite comment from both emotional supporters and
detractors. Though his ideas were shunned by American politicians
and policy-makers, some of Lattimore's insights in China and
Southeast Asia have nonetheless proven uncannily prescient:
Communism, as a form of economy and governance, failed because it
couldn't compete with capitalism; the People's Republic of China,
being too big to ignore, is becoming a pragmatic U.S. partner in
trade.

On the 50th anniversary of the scandal, it appears that
Lattimore--whatever one may think of his politics--was a
reluctant crusader of free, and sometimes belligerent, speech. As
a once-vilified household name, he leaves an arresting legacy. In
post-millennium America, where McCarthy-style hysteria seems
alien and far removed, one wonders whether such repression can
happen again. Closer to home, other questions of precedence
remain. Did Hopkins do enough to shield free expression in the
academy? Lattimore himself highlights the dilemma: What happens
to those among us who loudly proclaim unpopular views,
repeatedly.

March 28, 1927

Dearest Family,

We are jogging blissfully along on the road from Chuguchak to
Urumchi, and traveling with a husband is a lot more fun than
traveling alone. We have done three stages in five days and it
doesn't seem to matter whether we ever arrive anywhere or
not."--Eleanor Holgate Lattimore, in Turkestan Reunion
(1934).

Owen Lattimore was a bespectacled, balding scholar, just a bit on
the short side, with a penchant for bicycling, loose-fitting
clothes, and book-lined offices. He was also a child of China.
Though born in Washington, D.C. in 1900 to David and Margaret
Lattimore, he left the States a year later. His father, a
language teacher, took the growing family to live in Chinese port
cities soon after the Boxer Rebellion targeted foreigners in
China. Owen lived in China until age 12, when he left to study
abroad in Swiss and British boarding schools. He returned in
1919.

Lattimore began a lifetime of intrepid travel across China when
he started working for Arnhold and Co. Ltd., a British
import-export firm. He hardly looked the business-type, arriving
in Chinese villages without guide, heavy baggage, or a stash of
Western food. He learned much about Chinese politics and
economics from negotiations with corrupt officials and exacting
traders, and chats with hospitable clerks.

His focus shifted to Mongolia on his honeymoon.

In 1925, Lattimore, already in love with the Far East, met
Eleanor Holgate on a camping trip. She was secretary of the
Peking Institute of Art History and also enamored with East Asia.
After a brief courtship the couple formed an adventurer's union,
marrying on March 4, 1926. "It would be a honeymoon for the
ages," writes Robert P. Newman, whose book Owen Lattimore and
the "Loss" of China (1992) chronicles much of Lattimore's
story. The couple planned a journey through exotic Chinese
Turkestan, about 1,600 miles west of Peking (now Beijing).

But troublesome pre-honeymoon details intervened, including
Chinese civil wars and a rebellion in Inner [Chinese] Mongolia.
Since standard routes were dangerous, Owen went ahead via a
caravan of camels, agreeing to send word for Eleanor to meet him
in Semipalatinsk, a Russian village. She would travel alone,
mostly via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Four months later, the new
bride got word and took off during the Siberian winter by train
and sled, almost missing her husband in the confusion of border
politics. For several months, they traveled through Central Asia
over ancient silk trade routes to India.

During the trip, Owen Lattimore met Mongols victimized by
Chinese, Russians, and Japanese. Moved by their tales, he
chronicled their stories in his travelogue, Desert Road to
Turkestan (1928). Eleanor, in her own memoir, Turkestan
Reunion, wrote of days spent riding through deserts and
winding canyons, of skirting apricot orchards in bloom, and
saddling up at midnight by candlelight. She wondered if they
would ever again "live so perfectly or be so free and happy."

Like the Lattimores themselves, Owen's scholarly route was
unique. In the summer of 1928, when the couple returned to the
United States, he applied for a grant from the Social Science
Research Council--even though he had done no college work. Isaiah
Bowman, head of the American Geographical Society and later
president of Johns Hopkins University, was impressed with
Lattimore's writings and his proposal to study Inner Asia. Bowman
pressed for a grant for Lattimore to study for a year at Harvard
University's Division of Anthropology with a follow-up year of
research in China, according to biographer Newman. After Harvard,
Lattimore was impatient with the quietude of academia and
returned to China--where Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang
Kai-shek was picking up the revolution begun by Sun Yat-sen.
Lattimore did field work in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia with
fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation.

In 1934, with grant money gone and a 3-year-old son, David, in
tow, the Lattimores counted themselves lucky when Owen landed a
job that still allowed him to live in China and travel, as well
as exchange ideas with top Asia scholars on the most
controversial subjects of the day. Lattimore became editor of
Pacific Affairs, a publication of the New York-based
Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a broad-minded think tank
of scholars and others interested in the region: including
Britons, Australians, French, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese, and
occasionally Russians. It was this job that later attracted the
attention of McCarthy and the scrutiny of anti-communist Senator
Patrick McCarran, a democrat from Nevada.

Though Owen Lattimore was a native U.S. citizen, America would
seem, in many ways, to be a foreign country. David Harvey, a
Hopkins professor of geography and environmental engineering
whose research focuses on Marxism, pointed out in a 1983 article
in the journal Antipode: "If Lattimore is guilty of
anything, I suspect it was simply that he knew the realities of
China too well and that he sought to convey them to an America
which he understood too little, largely in terms of its own
surface idealism. His whole deportment during the McCarthy period
testifies to his shocked disbelief that such an outrageous
violation of the spirit of American constitutionality could so
easily be inflicted upon him."

"My comments and interpretations have always been so independent
that I have in my time been criticized by Chinese, Japanese,
Germans, Russians, and Mongols, as well as by intemperate
Americans. . . . The criticisms run all the way from calling me
an arch-imperialist to calling me a Red."-- Owen Lattimore, in a 1945 article in China
Monthly.

In 1938, there were few clouds to foretell the impending
storm.

Bowman, who had become the university's fifth president in 1935,
lured Lattimore to the university, hiring him as a lecturer in
the Page School of International Relations at Homewood. A year
later, Lattimore was appointed director of the school, a graduate
studies program named for a Hopkins alumnus, journalist, and
ambassador to Britain during World War I. The school, which had
struggled to secure funding, was in need of a charismatic leader.
In 1939, based on the depth of his scholarship, Lattimore was
granted "indefinite tenure" despite his lack of a PhD or higher
degree. It's unclear how formal and official that tenure was, but
it was enough to protect him later.

Lattimore's courses often were popular. He offered firsthand
knowledge and tactile analysis of a region few Westerners
understood. In 1939, his course titled Current Political Problems
of the Orient featured introductory lectures on China, Mongolia,
Manchuria, Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, and Japan. (His
understanding of the motives of nations, which were often
economic and not ideological, would stick with some students.
Louis Robinson Jr. '49 remembers attending later lectures by
Lattimore during General Douglas MacArthur's 1950 ill-fated
drive across North Korea. "MacArthur said China would not get
involved," Robinson remembers. "On a Friday, Lattimore said it
would be hard to believe they would not enter [North Korea]
immediately. By Monday, they entered and outflanked
MacArthur.")

Lattimore was viewed as a down-to-earth teacher and, in
pre-McCarthy days, an unobtrusive presence on campus. Mongolia, a
less-than-hot area of international study, was nonetheless drawn
into the spotlight by his work on the region, including Outer
Mongolia (now Mongolia), a border country lodged between China
and Soviet Russia; Lattimore, working with the U.S. Embassy,
helped bring some of the first Mongolian scholars to the States,
including an old friend, the Dilowa Hutukhtu, or "Living
Buddha."

At Hopkins, two young Mongolian researchers, Gombojab "John"
Hangin and Urgunge "Peter" Onon, worked to create the first
handbook of the Mongol language ever issued in English, among
other projects. The third scholar, the Dilowa--a high dignitary
in the Lama Buddhist Church--became a famous robed figure on
campus. At one point, after wandering south into the city, the
66-year-old man, who spoke no English, was picked up and taken to
a Baltimore City police station where officers tried to determine
whether he was an illegal alien. When he kept saying the name
"Lattimore," the officers finally called the Hopkins scholar.

Lattimore openly doubted
America's ability to alter the fate of Asia in terms of
communism.

Lattimore also was able to keep his hand in China: In 1941, he
took a leave of absence to serve as a political advisor to
Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who appointed
Lattimore on the advice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; for
two years starting in 1942, he directed Pacific operations at the
U.S. Office of War Information, which broadcast pro-American news
and commentary; and following the end of World War II in 1945 he
went to Japan as an economic consultant for the U.S. Reparations
Mission.

Through the decades, he lectured and spoke widely, publishing
several books, The Making of Modern China (with Eleanor
Lattimore), Solution in Asia (1945), and others that
contained some conclusions his accusers would later cite as
pro-communist. Among other views, he began to challenge the
leadership abilities of Chiang Kai-shek, who was nonetheless
ardently supported by Americans on the right known as the "China
Lobby" as a viable force to counter communism. In 1949, a
defeated Chiang Kai-shek fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

By the late 1940s, the world had become a threatening place for
many Americans: Following World War II, the Soviet Union had
turned from ally to enemy and Mao Zedong-led communism rose in
China. There were fears the "domino effect" of communism would
topple country after country throughout Asia. Many in the United
States looked for somewhere to lay blame. What would become known
as the "Who Lost China?" question focused on China scholars and
policy advisors--many would be purged whether their views had
been heeded or not. Lattimore himself bore unwelcome news, openly
doubting America's ability to alter the fate of Asia in terms of
communism. He figured the Chinese and others controlled their own
fates.

Lattimore also did not hesitate to tap different political
"camps" if he thought the analysis was practical and accurate.
After the war he advised a purge of Japanese industrialists, the
Zaibatsu, to depower that nation's future military and give more
power to the common people. While editor of Pacific
Affairs, he published articles by writers sympathetic to
Russia's Marxist cause, and some favorable to Stalin, which he
later said was an effort to balance the dialogue. Yet in perhaps
his gravest error, he misjudged the Stalin purge trials,
editorializing in Pacific Affairs that abuses in that
government had been discovered and rectified. These writings, in
particular, would come back to haunt him.

He also admitted that in impoverished countries like Outer
Mongolia, socialism improved some elements of life--in terms of
security, economic prosperity, free education, and other
measures. He warned that if America didn't tread lightly in Asia,
it might push nations toward the Russian alternative. Then, in a
1948 speech and other venues, he threw down a gauntlet. "It is
time the United States faced the fact that Russian power and
Russian ideas cannot be totally excluded from Asia," he said.
"Instead of trying to stop Communism, we must swing over to a
policy of competition." He blamed policy problems in China on
"fire breathers in the 80th Congress" and "tom-tom beating in the
jingoistic press."

Described by some modern scholars as a man of strong opinions,
carelessly expressed, he nonetheless asserted that communism was
not the preferred course. "I do not believe that a spread of
Communism anywhere in Asia (or indeed Europe or America) is
either inevitable or desirable. . . . More than that, I believe
that the country which most people in Asia would like to imitate
and emulate is America rather than Russia," he wrote in a
response to critics in the December 1945 issue of China
Monthly.

In March 1950, just after McCarthy leveled his charges,
Hopkins's own student newspaper, the News-Letter reviewed
his record: "Mr. Lattimore's statements have never shown approval
of the Communist regime in China but in several instances he
found Communist policies more desirable than those of the
completely militant nationalists. As a historian, moreover, it
has been impossible for him to ignore the near inevitability of
Mao Tse-Tung's routing of the nationalists."

That wasn't patriotic enough by the standards of the day, and
Lattimore was caught in an ideological crossfire. Any outspoken
acknowledgment of communism's positive points--or finger-pointing
at members of Congress when Congress was busy blaming the
universities and State Department--was enough to brand him a
potential spy and Public Enemy No. 1.

And McCarthy, obsessed with the threat of U.S.-based communist
conspiracies, was glad to fire up the brand.

"My first reaction was an anger so hot and sweeping that it was
hard to think."--Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander, his 1950 book about the
McCarthy hearings.

When Lattimore drafted his cabled response to the AP telegram, he
didn't exactly control his temper. The cable "would have to hit
the front pages and hit them crisply. Clearly, this was going to
be a fight to the finish, and a knockdown drag-out fight," he
wrote in Ordeal by Slander. "I had as yet no conception of
the personality of McCarthy; but if he was a man who was willing
to make a totally unfounded charge of espionage, this was going
to be a dirty business."

During a stopover in London, he read an anguished letter from
Eleanor. "My darling, I don't know if I'm in Moscow or the moon.
It certainly isn't the United States," she wrote. "I have heard
more fantastic and terrifying things in the last twenty-four
hours than could happen in a nightmare."

Lattimore (l), long a chain
smoker, and McCarthy (upper right), said little to each
other during the hearings.

Lattimore kept his Page School directorship at Hopkins during the
McCarthy hearings of spring 1950. When Detlev W. Bronk, then
Hopkins president, first heard McCarthy's accusations of
espionage he told the Evening Sun "that's news to me."
Bronk said he was sure Lattimore would "be quick to deal with the
charges."

When Lattimore returned home, his public denial was filled with
bold barbs and haughty anger. "The Soviet Union ought to decorate
McCarthy for telling the kind of lies about the United States
that Russian propagandists couldn't invent," he said. "As for
myself, I, of course, bitterly resent this nonsense. No one likes
to be splattered with mud, even by a madman."

McCarthy's case, which unfolded in a series of fits, starts, and
leaks, followed a convoluted line of attack. He cited findings in
FBI documents he said would prove his case and claimed he had
witnesses who could link Lattimore to the Communist Party. (FBI
records released in the 1970s questioned the credibility of
witnesses and revealed that the FBI had found no real evidence
against Lattimore, according to Newman and others.) Leading the
witnesses was Louis Budenz, a former newspaper editor and
ex-communist, who had never met Lattimore but knew about him
through contacts. Budenz first said he knew Lattimore to be a
Soviet-advised communist and later amended that, saying he
belonged to a "communist cell" of writers whose ideas followed
the communist line.

William Zartman '52 (MA'52), who was a managing editor of the
News-Letter, went to the hearings. Says Zartman, now
Hopkins professor of international organization and conflict
resolution: "We were watching our gladiator. [Lattimore] was a
good academic doing his thing and we felt that McCarthy was a
Nazi in modern form."

The Lattimores, always intrepid in travel, tackled this crisis as
another challenge. Defense strategy meetings at home were
campaign-like, with Eleanor in the thick of it all; Owen and
Eleanor laughed heartily for newspaper photographers. In
mid-April, Owen Lattimore sat before microphones at one end of a
T-shaped table and plopped a fat, 42-page statement in front of
him. He adjusted his spectacles, according to Time
magazine, eyeing his accuser. McCarthy smiled indulgently
back.

Though many McCarthy targets meekly handed over names or took the
Fifth Amendment, Lattimore instead put on the gloves. The
49-year-old scholar challenged McCarthy to step out from behind
congressional immunity to make the charges. Lattimore and his
attorneys vowed to sue the senator for slander.

In a now famous exchange, he said the whole question raised by
McCarthy centered on America's best course in China. He again
urged the U.S. to encourage Chinese nationalism--even if it be
communist nationalism--in the hope of making a Tito out of Mao;
or, preferably, to support a democratic force within in China.

"Now, gentlemen," said Lattimore. "My analysis of this may be
partly or wholly wrong. But if anybody says that it is disloyal
or un-American, he is a fool or a knave." Lattimore looked
squarely at his accuser. "Let Senator McCarthy take note of
this."

The tide against Lattimore seemed to be reversing. On April 6,
Senator Millard Tydings, the Maryland democrat who chaired the
subcommittee hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
announced that a review of FBI files in the presence of Director
J. Edgar Hoover put the scholar "completely in the clear."

"He addressed U.S. senators
with great condescension and corrected the grammar of
interrogators."

But McCarthy didn't quit and the hearings went on for weeks, the
drama snaring the nation. When ex-communist Budenz was set to
speak, the chambers were so crammed with tourists, Capitol
spectators, senators, and reporters, that Eleanor had to sit on
the floor. Their son, David, then an English major at Harvard,
attended in a new tan suit.

Owen Lattimore took the junior senator from Wisconsin to task,
using his self-defense as a podium to lecture McCarthy and
America on Asian history and politics. A newspaper editorial
cartoon depicts Lattimore as a scolding teacher, shaking a ruler
at a sweating, 5 o'clock-shadowed-McCarthy. A "Handy 25-cent
Guide to Asia" peeks out of McCarthy's coat pocket.

"He addressed U.S. senators with great condescension and contempt
and corrected the grammar of interrogators," remembers David
Lattimore, now professor emeritus in classical Chinese studies at
Brown University. "To him, it was sort of damned if you do,
damned if you don't. He could have been suave and subtle, but he
felt that McCarthy in particular was a completely unprincipled
man. He said he never hated Joe McCarthy, he was just what he
was, a barroom brawler out of his depth."

Back at Hopkins, while Lattimore remained under suspicion,
faculty and students turned out in the third week in May for a
rally. A faculty-led dinner in his honor at the Hopkins Club was
set for 50 colleagues. From the club, the group walked over to
Levering Hall, where a reception was supposed to be limited to a
few hundred. But before 8 p.m., people who had not gotten
"tickets" were darting about campus looking for professors to get
them into Levering. As many as 600 students and faculty showed
up, and loudspeakers carried the address to people outside.
Lattimore got a standing ovation.

Ross Jones '53, who had taken Lattimore's courses on China,
attended the packed rally. "I was way in the back and standing on
tiptoes and looking in the Great Hall," says Jones, now Hopkins
vice president and secretary emeritus. "I remember being really
moved by the faculty coming together for a show of support."

Lattimore was introduced by George Boas, chair of the Philosophy
Department, and a Lattimore defender. Boas would go on to launch
a drive to raise $40,000 for a Lattimore defense fund during his
later trials, despite controversy on campus. He also helped lead
an effort to counter public criticism of Lattimore's lack of
formal academic credentials by publishing a pamphlet titled
Lattimore, The Scholar, which featured testimonials from
37 prestigious colleagues. (The 1953 pamphlet's co-editor, Harvey
Wheeler, a Hopkins assistant professor of political science, left
soon after its publication, later saying he was forced out
because of his support for Lattimore.)

Boas, who didn't then know how long the case would go on, said
that night: "Many of us thought heresy trials were things of the
past. . . . The cloud of poison gas spreading over the country
has not yet smothered the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University
who remain faithful to their university's motto, The truth
will set you free."

In July, the Tydings committee report cleared Owen Lattimore: "We
find no evidence to support the charge that Owen Lattimore is the
'top Russian spy' or, for that matter, any other sort of spy."
Tydings labeled McCarthy's case "a fraud and a hoax."

But emerging politics would continue to paint an alarming
landscape. On June 25, 1950, when Kim Il-sung launched North
Korean forces into South Korea, American soldiers were drawn into
the Korean War. Fear of communism surged at home. Tydings was
voted out of office during the fall 1950 election, with McCarthy
helping the opposition. Congress leaned to the right, and
McCarthy kept the cross-hairs on Lattimore. Another Cold War
warrior, Senator McCarran, was still convinced that Lattimore was
the chief architect behind America's failure in China. Things
would get worse.

Letters poured in to the
university, most denouncing Lattimore.

Dear Dr. Reed,

I see by the news journals that Johns
Hopkins has reinstated that foxy character, Owen
Lattimore.
Thus does the Biblical Dog return to its
vomit.

Cordially yours,
Edith Dickey Moses

Dear Lover of Traitors and Red Treason, Detlev Bronk:

Today William Christian Bullitt testified under oath that in
1939 the prime minister of France, Daladier, informed him
that ALGER HISS, THE DISTINGUISHED ALUMNUS OF JOHNS HOPKINS,
was a Russian spy.
Mr. Bullitt also gave information
on THE JOHNS HOPKINS
PROFESSOR, the phony Doctor Lattimore (who is only a grade
school graduate as he did not even graduate from high
school).
Don't you think it high time to clean the
traitors out of
Johns Hopkins? Also it is high time for you to resign and
make way for a decent and patriotic American in your
Red-infested University.

Dear Mr. Carlyle Barton
President, Board of Trustees:

Over the period of years Professor Owen Lattimore has only
tried to do what every scholar should, namely to investigate
all sides of a problem.... He is not a Communist and he has
not been engaged in subversive activities. All of his
answers were not tactful and some of them may have been
inconsistent, but could any of us be questioned for 11 days
on the minute details of his activities during the previous
10 years and never contradict himself?

Helen B. Taussig, M.D.

"If I smiled at all, it was certainly a non-Communist smile....
I thought that these grim conspirators regarded a smile as a
bourgeois gesture--practically as an enemy of the state. If I am
wrong, and if a smile is a secret Red signal, I confess that I
used to smile a great deal. In the pre-McCarthy days I used to
think that life was lots of fun."--Lattimore's response to an accusation that he acknowledged a
colleague's communist affiliations with a knowing
smile.

Aweek before New Year's 1951, the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee (SISS), chaired by McCarran, was formed to
investigate the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Lattimore's
editorship at Pacific Affairs, to build a case against
him. The committee, which learned about IPR records stored in a
barn near Lee, Massachusetts, would use details in the records to
question Lattimore about past dates and events, and to lay a
perjury trap.

In the last half of 1951, McCarran's subcommittee launched a
rehash of the McCarthy allegations, featuring the ex-communist
informer Budenz. Byzantine arguments bogged down over such points
as whether Lattimore ever called the Chinese communists "agrarian
reformers." Former Soviet citizens and academic critics gave
additional testimony against Lattimore. Most of their remarks
centered on analyses of Lattimore's writings, or remembered
phrases from snatches of conversation. The committee again
analyzed Lattimore's influence on U.S. foreign policy in China by
combing memos he had written.

An increasingly frustrated and enraged Lattimore then asked for a
hearing before the subcommittee to clear his name. Long a chain
smoker given to nervous gestures, he developed a facial tic that
followed him to the end of his life. Friends observed that he and
Eleanor had aged noticeably, hair graying, faces creasing.
Lecture invitations and social calls dried up, according to
Newman. In 1949, Lattimore received more than 100 invites to
speak. In 1951, there were three.

Eleanor and Owen Lattimore, often
pictured beaming during the crisis, speak with
Hopkins's George Boas.

On Feb. 26, 1952, Lattimore sat down with a 50-page, 17,500-word
statement he had given to the press. Before he could read two
paragraphs, he was subjected to a drum fire of senators'
questions. In one exchange reminiscent of the trial in Alice
in Wonderland, Senator Willis Smith (D-N.C.), challenged
Lattimore's charge that the witnesses against him were not being
cross-examined for veracity or motive.

After the first of a relentless 12 days of questioning, Lattimore
was overheard by a reporter as he walked down a corridor with his
wife: "Well, if I'm going down, I might as well go down
swinging." He would swing even harder than before.

Lattimore's written statement--his refutation of charges, his
reassertion that he was not a communist, and his insistence that
he had little influence on U.S. politics because few leaders did
what he suggested--was also rife with sarcastic asides. In his
outline, he heads Section V: "Regurgitation of Charges disproved
by Tydings investigation shows change in cast of characters.
Additions: a vague Red General and a crackpot professor." He told
the committee, "I should, in fact, be less frank if I did not
confess that I see no hope that your committee will fairly
appraise the facts." And he charged senators with "instituting a
reign of terror" among foreign service personnel.

A stung McCarran read an unusual statement at the conclusion of
Lattimore's testimony. "The committee has been confronted here
with an individual so flagrantly defiant of the United States
Senate, so outspoken in his discourtesy, and so persistent in his
efforts to confuse and obscure the facts, that the committee
feels constrained to take due notice of his conduct."

Eugene Sekulow '53 (MA '54, PhD '60), then a graduate student in
political science, attended the hearings. He had studied with
Lattimore, and kept in touch over the years. "Lattimore answered
stupid questions by indicating that he thought they were stupid,"
Sekulow remembers. "He did not tolerate fools in his class. Why
should he tolerate them in Congress?"

Though some Hopkins faculty and others praised Lattimore's
bravery, his blunt criticism of subcommittee members, and his
overall demeanor, would be viewed as going too far. He had
violated the decorum expected of a professor, and sympathy for
the beleaguered scholar started to wane in the press and on
campus.

"Many people said he was literally arrogant before the committee,
unforgiving in his views and sarcastic," says M. Gordon "Reds"
Wolman '49, now Hopkins professor of geography and environmental
engineering. Should he have been more diplomatic? "If you are
careful with some people, you could come out better. Personally
he might have done better, but you can't know. The best civil
rights people say, 'Don't be a coward.'"

Says David Lattimore, now 69, "My father did not look at these as
bona fide Senate proceedings for a legitimate purpose with
legitimate evidence. These were not people behaving in such a way
they deserved to be treated with the respect due statesmen."

Lattimore was now in danger of being censored, or punished, for
unpopular speech of another kind. "The fact could hardly be
ignored that Lattimore had greatly alienated and with his
obduracy continued to alienate many people," wrote Lionel S.
Lewis, in The Cold War and Academic Governance: The Lattimore
Case at Johns Hopkins (1993), which provides an in-depth look
at what unfolded on campus. "Not the least of these was an
increasing number of the more prominent members of the board [of
trustees] who had become convinced that [Lattimore] was injuring
the university, which was seen as quite vulnerable."

Letters started to flow into Hopkins, most denouncing Lattimore,
others praising Hopkins for showing restraint and supporting
academic freedom. Yet the university was under an intense amount
of pressure to fire him, and many of the notes that ended up in
the president's office were glib or angry. One penny postcard
bearing the stamped profile of Thomas Jefferson noted: "What is
the possible reason for Johns Hopkins allowing a highly
questionable character like Owen Lattimore to hold a
professorship? He is an ugly duckling with pink feathers which
are turning red, Disgustingly yours, Semper Paratus, Astoria,
N.Y."

With some alumni threatening to cut off donations, the board of
trustees split over what to do with Lattimore. One trustee, Jacob
France, resigned, withdrawing his financial support. Although a
few members drafted a resolution to fire Lattimore in 1952, the
board held off. It did, however, pass a resolution denouncing
communism on campus, according to Lewis.

The national controversy would spark other intrigue at Hopkins.
In early 1952, Lattimore publicly named a McCarthy informant: his
colleague George F. Carter, Hopkins professor of geography and
department chair. And a fateful picnic at the Lattimore house
entered Hopkins lore.

Nearly seven years earlier, the Lattimores had hosted a June
cookout at their Ruxton home. Invited were Carter and his wife;
Professor Malcolm Moos and his fiancˇe; and two friends from
Washington, writer Andrew Roth, of the Office of Naval
Intelligence, and John Steward Service, a State Department
diplomat. Roth had just completed a book on Japan and wanted
Lattimore to look at the proofs. The group ate hamburgers and
admired Chinese art objects in the house.

But what Lattimore didn't know was that the FBI was tailing Roth
and Service, who were arrested three days later in connection
with the 1945 Amerasia stolen documents case, in which
classified reports were allegedly passed to the left-wing
magazine. (No evidence of espionage was found; Service was
dismissed from the State Department, but a Supreme Court ruling
later allowed him to return.) Carter reported clandestinely to
McCarthy that Lattimore, Roth, and Service had conferred over
questionable documents, according to Newman. When Lattimore
branded his colleague an informer in 1952, Carter became a pariah
on campus, Wolman and others say. Other faculty, however, shared
a growing distaste for Lattimore, and many a faculty meeting or
affair became polarized.

Wolman, who had returned to Hopkins in 1958 as chair of the
department where Carter remained a professor, invited Lattimore
to again lecture in geography. Carter and Lattimore avoided each
other like two negative charges. "It was a very, very
difficult scene," Wolman remembers. "If there was some faculty
event and one was there and the other appeared, one would
disappear instantly."

Carter had been a mentor to Wolman when he was a student of
geography in the late 1940s. Wolman thinks Carter would have
thought reporting Lattimore his civic duty: "George believed that
there were forces undermining the strength, capacity, or value of
the United States of America."

Partly to ease faculty and other tensions in spring 1952,
President Bronk appointed a committee of eight faculty to
consider Lattimore's testimony and propose solutions. The group,
called the Bard committee after its chair (physiologist Philip
Bard, later appointed dean of the School of Medicine), finished
its report in May.

Committee members noted that if Lattimore was found guilty in
court, the university should dismiss him. But because the
university had granted Lattimore tenure, "whether that
appointment is a mistake or not is immaterial," the group also
pointed out that he should be reinstated if acquitted. Meanwhile,
he should be kept on paid leave.

The committee also agreed that Lattimore's conduct was
"deplorable" but wasn't cause for dismissal because he was acting
on the advice of his attorney. Besides, they pointed out, he was
being "quizzed mercilessly on events of ten or more years ago."
The faculty members did, however, note that Lattimore had
"clearly challenged the committee by his provocative statement.
After that he had to expect unsympathetic treatment."

In July, the Senate subcommittee recommended indicting Lattimore
for perjury. On December 16, 1952, after continued lobbying by
McCarran, a federal grand jury returned a seven-count indictment
against Lattimore on charges of perjury--the first being that he
lied under oath when he denied he had promoted communism or
communist interests. (A similar tactic had worked against Hiss,
former assistant to the head of the Far Eastern desk at the State
Department. Hiss, a Phi Beta Kappa student whose time at Hopkins
did not overlap Lattimore's, was convicted of perjury in early
1950.) Bronk immediately put Lattimore on leave with pay, with
approval of the trustees, until the case was resolved.

To this day, faculty, alumni, and others have debated whether
Hopkins responded appropriately when one of its own was attacked.
Should Lattimore's brand of free expression have been better
defended? "The university could have been more forthcoming and
stood behind Lattimore," says alumnus Sekulow, a retired
executive vice president with Bell Atlantic/Nynex. "The
administration took a neutral position, and to me that was the
same as being opposed to him."

Richard Macksey '53 (MA '53, PhD '57), Hopkins professor in the
Humanities Center, noted that McCarthyism put academics under the
gun. (Some universities, including Tulane, were later criticized
for dismissing tenured "left-wing" professors.) "I think
[Hopkins] was probably honorable," Macksey said. "They defended
him simply by putting him on leave. Some people would say they
took him out of the classroom and that was censorship. I think
not. I think it was the humane thing to do while he had to defend
himself in court. . . . I think the university maybe didn't look
as heroic as it might have, but I think it came out pretty well
on the Lattimore issue."

Chester Wickwire, Hopkins chaplain emeritus and a civil rights
activist who has long courted controversy, arrived on campus in
the early 1950s. During the hearings, Wickwire tried to arrange
for Lattimore to speak at Levering Hall on academic freedom, but
he was barred: Hopkins administrators "were supportive in the
sense that they paid his salary, but they didn't want him
speaking around," Wickwire remembers.

Unpopular speech often does not make one popular and Americans--
who loudly tout free speech protections--may be only so willing
to stand up for someone's right to be annoying. "Lattimore was a
prickly person," Macksey notes. "But was indeed a scholar and
indeed a person who was abused in the press [and] before
Congress."

At University of Leeds in
England, Lattimore was lauded for standing up to that
Yankee madman, McCarthy.

"To require a defendant to go to trial for perjury under charges
so formless and obscure as those before the Court would be
unprecedented and would make a sham of the Sixth Amendment."--U.S. District Court Judge Luther W.
Youngdahl.

By the mid-1950s, McCarthyism was waning and Americans were
getting used to the Cold War. Lattimore the scholar was fading
from the spotlight. After a series of perjury count dismissals,
Justice Department appeals, indictments on new counts, a petition
to remove the judge, and other tortured judicial proceedings,
Lattimore was finally in the clear by summer 1955 when the
Justice Department, faced by an increasingly unlikely chance to
gain a conviction, dismissed the charges. It was too late for
Lattimore.

Hopkins had disbanded the Page School of International Relations
in 1953, thus stripping Lattimore of his directorship. (The
school was suffering from funding problems because of the
Lattimore issue, and in 1950 Hopkins had absorbed the School of
Advanced International Studies [SAIS], a graduate school in
Washington.)

In 1955, Lattimore was restored to duty as a lecturer in the
Department of History, and was grateful for the support of fellow
faculty. In the years that followed, he still made headlines
offering advice on international affairs, including America's
troubled role in Taiwan, and continued his crusade to expand
Inner Asian studies on campus. But wounds from the McCarthy era
turned into scars. Warren Silver (PhD '53) heard Lattimore speak
before and after the scandal. "I noticed that toward the end it
seemed the poor fellow was a broken man, quite changed," Silver
says. "He was very hesitant in his delivery, not with the same
confidence."

Despite the demise of McCarthyism (McCarthy himself would be
censured by his Senate colleagues for unbecoming conduct in
1954), fear and persecution of left-leaning, or radical,
academics would last into the 1970s and beyond. "You should never
underestimate how fast moral and political panics can seize this
country," says Harvey, who says his Marxist interpretations of
geography have gotten little support. "At this particular moment,
I don't see possibilities down [ideological] lines. But now
there's a more sinister process, the university is becoming more
of a corporation with money behind it. Money power doesn't fund
dissident research." He adds: "What do I do, start up the Center
for Marxist Studies funded by General Motors?"

Dismayed by academic constraints he perceived in America,
Lattimore left Hopkins in 1963 to direct the newly formed Chinese
Studies program at the University of Leeds in England, where he
had a distinguished career and was lauded for standing up to
that Yankee madman, McCarthy. But he was yet to face his worst
crisis.

When Lattimore retired from Leeds in 1970, he and Eleanor planned
to live in a Virginia house Eleanor had designed. But she died
suddenly, suffering an embolism just after their plane home
landed at Kennedy Airport in New York. The 44-year honeymoon was
over. "He was really flourishing in England until my mother
died," David Lattimore remembers. "He had a hard time, he was
very dependent on her. They did everything as a team. "

For years, an increasingly melancholy Owen Lattimore said
little publicly about Hopkins's role in the affair. Yet, as he
gained the sort of irreverance a man in his 80s feels toward a
receding world, he became more outspoken on that point, too. In
1984, five years before his death, he described Hopkins's actions
as a dodge: "Don't fire the professor, get rid of the
department," he told People magazine. The old China hand
"seemed to feel the Hopkins administration blamed him in some way
for what happened," Harvey says. "Even though they didn't fire
him, he was made to feel culpable."

Yet when Lattimore gave a farewell lecture to a packed Shriver
Hall auditorium in 1963, his message was clear. He wanted to be
remembered for other things.

"The people who came had an idea he would speak about
McCarthyism, of the trials and tribulations of the era,"
remembers Wolman. "He did no such thing. He spoke about Mongolia,
about horse racing and poetry--how Mongolians won races not just
on how well their horses did, but on how well they wrote a
poem.

"There were probably three people in the audience, other than
Eleanor, who had any notion about what he was describing," Wolman
says. "Again, that's a measure of an independent mind. He chose
to do what he chose to do."